Tissue products, such as facial tissues, paper towels, bath tissues, sanitary napkins, and other similar products, are designed to include several important properties. For example, the products should have good bulk, a soft feel, and should have good strength. Unfortunately, however, when steps are taken to increase one property of the product, other characteristics of the product are often adversely affected.
For example, during a papermaking process, it is common to use various resins to increase the wet strength of the web. Cationic resins, for example, are often used because they are believed to more readily bond to the anionically charged cellulosic fibers. Although strength resins can increase the strength of the web, they also tend to stiffen the web, which is often undesired by consumers. Thus, various methods are often used to counteract this stiffness and to soften the product. For example, chemical debonders can be utilized to reduce fiber bonding and thereby increase softness.
Nevertheless, reducing fiber bonding with a chemical debonder can sometimes adversely affect the strength of the tissue product. For example, hydrogen bonds between adjacent fibers can be broken by such chemical debonders, as well as by mechanical forces of a papermaking process. Consequently, such debonding results in loosely bound fibers that extend from the surface of the tissue product. During processing and/or use, these loosely bound fibers can be freed from the tissue product, thereby creating lint, which is defined as individual airborne fibers and fiber fragments. Moreover, papermaking processes may also create zones of fibers that are poorly bound to each other but not to adjacent zones of fibers. As a result, during use, certain shear forces can liberate the weakly bound zones from the remaining fibers, thereby resulting in slough, i.e., bundles or pills on surfaces, such as skin or fabric. Thus, the use of such debonders can often result in a much weaker paper product during use that exhibits substantial amounts of lint and slough.
As such, a need currently exists for a tissue product that is strong, soft, and that also has low lint and slough.